Valérie Trierweiler: ‘It’s more dignified to shut up? Is that how we serve the cause of women? I don’t think so…’

Her explosive memoir about life as President Hollande’s partner (and then, suddenly, ex) has caused a sensation in France. Here Valérie Trierweiler talks about being ‘betrayed and humiliated’ by the president, her supposed suicide attempt, and why the first lady comes last in French politics

Valérie Trierweiler: ‘I found myself the only woman in France who no longer had the right to work, to speak or to not be married.’ Photograph: Rannjan Joawn for the Observer

Only four people knew that Valérie Trierweiler, the former first lady of France, was writing a memoir: her literary agent, two employees from the publishing house and Trierweiler herself. The secrecy was such that Trierweiler had to conduct the whole operation as though starring in her own cold war espionage drama.

She wrote everything on a computer not connected to the internet, saving chunks of the manuscript on a USB stick, which would be collected from her Paris apartment by her agent, who would take it to the publishers in instalments. They would read it on computers with no internet connection, anxious that no one from the president’s office would find out what they were doing and try to stop them. Not a single sheet of paper was ever printed out. Trierweiler refused to talk about the project by phone, even to her mother, who was given a copy of the book only two days before publication. The document was saved under a pseudonym. Trierweiler called herself John Milton, after the 17th-century author of Paradise Lost.

The comparison was not without relevance. Trierweiler felt she had lost something profound – not exactly a paradise, but a brutal blow to her happiness nonetheless. For the best part of a decade she had been in what she thought was a loving relationship with François Hollande, a man she had fallen for when she was a political journalist and he a junior Socialist politician. When they met in the 1990s they were both in relationships other people – he with Ségolène Royal, a young minister who would become a rising star in the Socialist party; she was married to Denis Trierweiler, an editor on Paris Match, the magazine where she worked. They had seven children between them. It wasn’t an easy situation. They dismantled their lives to be together. Their intimacy, so Trierweiler thought, had been strengthened by what they had been through to achieve it.

‘My story was a love story’: Valérie Trierweiler with François Hollande in 2011. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

“My story, it was a love story, that’s what I believe above all,” she says now. “He was not the president [when I fell in love with him]. No one thought he would be. It was the man that I loved.”

Trierweiler saw Hollande’s potential for high office, even when those around him were dismissive of his chances. She campaigned for him, standing by his side as he pressed the flesh and built up support. When he was elected president in May 2012, it was the culmination of a joint dream. Trierweiler gave up her job to avoid accusations of bias, moving to become Paris Match’s literary critic.

And then, in January this year, 18 months after the election, it emerged the president had been having an affair with the actor Julie Gayet. He had been photographed arriving at Gayet’s apartment on a moped, his face obscured by a crash helmet. A security guard is said to have brought the couple fresh croissants in the mornings. The pictures were splashed across the press. A humiliated Trierweiler was publicly ditched by Hollande in a terse 18-word statement announcing that he was “putting an end” to their “shared life”. It was, she says when we meet, “a betrayal and, on top of that, a public humiliation.”

As payback for his cavalier treatment of her, Trierweiler started writing. To begin with, she says, it was a form of therapy. She would write in bed, late into the night, “sometimes in tears”. Then, the more it poured out of her, the more she began to realise it could be a book.

'We had moments of happiness which I don’t forget. I would have preferred it if he had never been president'

And what a book it is. I have never read anything quite like Merci pour ce moment (Thank You for This Moment). It is 300-odd pages of deliciously backhanded barbs, sentimental hand-wringing and vicious putdowns, seasoned with large dollops of self-justification. Trierweiler is forever dashing into bathrooms and collapsing while Hollande is an unfeeling prig who either ignores her or tells her to stop being so melodramatic. Several pages are devoted to Trierweiler’s humanitarian work, where she describes herself bringing light and meaning into the lives of countless destitute individuals and disabled children. Hollande, meanwhile, is shown mocking the poor, insulting Trierweiler’s working-class family, struggling with his weight and swearing on her son’s life that he was not having an affair with Gayet. Once they’d broken up, Trierweiler writes that he bombarded her with loving texts when he should have been concentrating on meetings with Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama.

Trierweiler during her visit to a slum in Mumbai, India in January 2014, just days after Hollande had announced that they were splitting up. Photograph: Divyakant Solanki/EPA

“He writes that he will win me back,” she recounts in the book, “as if I was an election.”

At one point she even nonchalantly drops in a rumour she’s heard that Hollande has fathered “a black child in [his constituency,] Corrèze”. When I ask her about this, she shrugs. “I don’t know if he does or not.”

Reading Thank You for This Moment is like reliving the time you drunkenly sent a series of vitriolic texts to your university boyfriend who dumped you for someone he met while backpacking through Thailand. It makes you squirm. And, at the same time, it is totally compelling.

Needless to say, it has sold by the bucketload in France, shifting more than 600,000 copies in two months. It is out here this week in English translation. Since its publication, Trierweiler has been accused of everything from anti-feminism to bringing the presidency into disrepute. She has been pilloried as the scorned woman and the vindictive harpy. Worse still, some French critics sniffed at her grammar.

We meet in the sitting room of a plush boutique hotel in Paris, the kind of place where everything is upholstered in varying degrees of chintz. By contrast, the 49-year-old Trierweiler is a study of soignée minimalism. She wears a black trouser suit and white wrap-around blouse. Her face is more delicate than it appears in photographs – fine-boned and beautiful, accentuated by a casual blowdry and a smudge of red lipstick. She seems anxious, a touch guarded. Her laugh seems a nervous tic.

One senses that while she does not particularly like raking over the details of her heartbreak to a journalist she has only just met, it is simultaneously the only thing she can talk about. She is drawn to the topic again and again, a scab she has to pick. The book, she says, arose not out of a need for revenge but was rather “a cry from the heart”. The writing of it was “vital… It was not my objective to destroy François Hollande. It was to reconstruct me.”

'It was not my objective to destroy François Hollande. It was to reconstruct me'

But as a “woman of the left”, hasn’t she caused untold harm to both the Socialist party and the image of the president by airing her dirty laundry in public? “No, I don’t think so. If you look at what happened before the publication of the book, the election results were disastrous… The [presidential] approval ratings, were exactly the same – in fact they were lower before the book, and now they’re a bit better. The French are fairly tolerant about people’s private lives. They are pretty intelligent. What they care about is living standards… 10% of people in France live below the poverty line. Those are the numbers that count, not whether I said he [Hollande] could tell a lie.”

She is magnificently unrepentant, describing her breakup with Hollande as “not only losing the man you love, but losing your public role and losing your own self-esteem.”

After learning that he had been having an affair, Trierweiler took a large quantity of sleeping pills. This was reported in the media as a suicide attempt. “It was not a suicide attempt,” she says. “It was an attempt to escape. What I wanted was not to have to live the next few hours. It wasn’t that I no longer wanted to live.”

She was later hospitalised and claims she was put on “astronomical doses” of tranquillisers following “instructions from on high” to ensure she didn’t make a scene.

Power, she writes, had acted “like an acid” on their relationship. Trierweiler found herself excluded from meetings as soon as Hollande took office and was no longer expected to have an opinion on policy. Her role was suddenly to stay silent, where before she felt she had made helpful contributions to his campaign. Their relationship had always relied on a certain exclusive intimacy. Now she was being pushed out by a possessive coterie of advisers.

Francois Hollande celebrates with Trierweiler in Paris in 2012 after winning the French presidential election: Power, she wrote, acted ‘like an acid’ in their relationship. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

When Hollande’s popularity ratings plummeted, she says he became difficult to live with – closed-off, angry and resentful. She writes of several occasions when he barred her from official events, insisting that she had no place there. He demanded once that she change before a dinner, deeming her outfit “too sexy”. Trierweiler refused, but compromised by throwing a wrap over her shoulders.

She writes that Hollande, at 5ft 7in, hated it when she wore heels. When I remind her of this, she grins, eyes glinting. “I could never wear these when I was with him” – and she lifts her leg over the coffee table, hitching up her trousers to reveal a spiky black six-inch heel.

The way Trierweiler sees it, the media turned against Hollande almost as soon as he took office: “He wasn’t given enough time to adapt. Now he is one of the most unpopular presidents France has ever had. Perhaps we expect too much of our presidents.” She pauses. “Perhaps I expected too much of the man I loved.”

Looking back, she insists she has no sadness about embarking on the relationship : “We had moments of happiness which I don’t forget. I would have preferred it if he had never been president,” she says sipping her tea and leaving a lipstick trace on the china rim.

When Hollande became president, Trierweiler became the immediate target of negative attention. The couple were not married, and there were grumblings that, with no official status as first lady, she should not be spending money on her five personal assistants and the running of an independent office in the Elysée. Her public image was aloof and cold. “There were journalists who knew me from before,” she explains. “They knew I wasn’t the last to crack jokes at the back of an airplane on an official trip. But I cut links with every journalist I knew, including my friends, when François became president. I preferred not to see them at all so as not to be accused of bias. Then I was seen as someone who, when she was in power, didn’t want anything to do with them.”

She was portrayed as meddlesome and pushy, with an undue influence on both Hollande’s policies and his wardrobe. When, a month after his election, she sent out a tweet expressing her support for the dissident Socialist candidate Olivier Falorni, who was standing for public office in La Rochelle against Hollande’s ex-partner, there was a public outcry. Royal lost the election. Trierweiler was seen as a vengeful second wife, staking out her territory. She later apologised.

'For me, the complicated bit was to sign up to a role where I had nothing to say any more. I had no more legitimacy'

When I ask if she has any regrets, this is the only incident she cites. Her supposed haughtiness, she claims, stems simply from a lack of confidence. She dismisses the other criticisms as being motivated by rank sexism.

“It’s difficult to be a woman. It’s very, very difficult to be a woman in politics – I am not one, but I have seen it. It’s a milieu that is very macho. But at least female politicians have the legitimacy of election. For me, the complicated bit was to sign up to a role where I had nothing to say any more. I no longer had any legitimacy. I had been a political journalist for 20 years and I still had that critical eye but [as first lady] I was no longer allowed to express an opinion. The most difficult thing was to do nothing, to be the trophy wife. I found myself the only woman in France who no longer had the right to work, to speak or to not be married.”

Trierweiler had always cherished her independence. She grew up in a working-class family in Angers in the French provinces. Her father, Jean-Noël Massonneau, had lost a leg as a 12-year-old during the second world war when a childhood dispute resulted in a live grenade being thrown. An American soldier was killed. Massonneau survived but had his leg amputated.

As a result, he did not work as an adult. Trierweiler’s mother, Jeannie, had six children in less than five years and was a full-time housewife. The family lived off Massonneau’s war invalid pension. Although her childhood was “joyful”, Trierweiler vividly recalls her mother having to ask her father for money to go grocery shopping. “I said: ‘I never want to be like that,’” she remembers.

She later won a place at the Sorbonne to study history and political science, graduating with a master’s degree. She married her first husband, childhood friend Franck Thurieau, but the relationship didn’t last. By 1988 she was working as a reporter on Profession Politique magazine and later she joined Paris Match where she met her second husband, Denis, whose surname she still bears. They were divorced in 2010 – three years after her relationship with Hollande was revealed.

Trierweiler was reluctant to give up her career simply because her boyfriend had been elected president. Besides, she needed to keep working to support her three sons (now aged 17, 20 and 21). She started reviewing books for the magazine but even that attracted public opprobrium. She is still exasperated by this, commenting that no one had a problem when Nicolas Sarkozy’s wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, kept her singing career going throughout her husband’s term in office (though, in fact, they did).

Valérie Trierweiler greets ex-first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy at the Elysée Palace, 2012: “She suffered during her time at the Elysée. She said how difficult it had been for her.’ Photograph: Unimediaimages Inc/ADC / Rex F

“In the name of what must a woman abandon her job?” she asks with a rhetorical flourish, letting the question float unanswered amid the chintz.

Bruni-Sarkozy is one of a handful of former first ladies who sent Trierweiler supportive messages about the book. She remembers talking to Bruni-Sarkozy at the handover of the presidency and noticing her predecessor had tears in her eyes as she spoke. “She suffered during her time at the Elysée [the official residence of the French president],” Trierweiler says. “She said how difficult it had been for her.” Trierweiler writes that Sarkozy had been so concerned about the negative press surrounding his wife that he had called on “specialist companies to increase the visibility of honourable mentions and positive articles about Carla”.

Trierweiler, too, disliked living in the Elysée, surrounded by “snobby” advisers who “feel themselves very superior” and to whom “betrayal is seen as a virtue”. To this day, she will take a detour around the Elysée when travelling in central Paris. “In France, the problem is that nothing is defined [about the role of first lady],” she says. She is highly critical of how the wives of state leaders are portrayed in the media: “There is this constant myth that the woman is pushing the man to make decisions, that she’s meddling. It’s always that myth of the woman who is too involved. That’s sexist also. What man would accept to play the role that a woman plays? To smile, to stay silent, to walk several steps behind his wife? Not one man would do it. Mr Merkel does not do it.”

She raises some important issues but her points are undermined by the book’s relentlessly score-settling tone. As a result, her opinions are more easily dismissed as the ravings of a vitriolic jilted woman, which is probably unfair. Yet her championing of women’s rights sits uneasily with some, who point out that she struck up a relationship with Hollande when he was still with Segolène Royal, the mother of his four children. In the book, Trierweiler describes infidelity as “an infernal cycle”. Does she now feel any guilt towards Royal?

“Yes and no, because I reacted with honesty… I resisted for a very long time. The culpability is not just mine, it must be his too. I was married as well. I had children. I was not some single woman who had come along to destroy their marriage.”

And what does she think of Julie Gayet, who supplanted Trierweiler’s role as “the other woman”?

Trierweiler says she has become “more feminist” since her bruising experience in the Elysée. And yet critics say her memoir does a disservice to women. Kim Willsher, writing in the Guardian, asked: “Why become the living, breathing embodiment of the sexist old adage about hell and a scorned woman’s fury?”

I broach this with Trierweiler and she seizes on the notion. It is the most animated I’ve seen her throughout the interview. “These people want to say that the dignified woman is the woman who shuts up,” she replies. “Is that how we serve the cause of women? I don’t think so. Is it OK to be mistreated by a man without saying anything? No.”

Our time is up. I turn the recorder off. Trierweiler’s shoulders relax. She reaches for a green paper napkin on the table in front of us and I realise that she is crying. It is not a showy cry, designed to elicit sympathy. It is a quiet burst of tears, and she seems genuinely embarrassed, dabbing at her eyes quickly and apologising while trying to smile. It is a display of unexpected fragility. Whatever else Valérie Trierweiler has been portrayed as – vengeful harpy, ambitious meddler, undignified ex – she is also a woman who has had her heart broken. People deal with heartbreak in different ways, not all of them rational. Trierweiler chose to write a book about it. Maybe it was necessary therapy but I’m not yet convinced she’s closed the final chapter.

Thank You for This Moment is published by Biteback (£18.99). Click here to buy it for £16.14

• This article was amended on 25 November 2014. An earlier version wrongly referred to Segolène Royal as François Hollande’s ex-wife. They were never married.